Reflections on the philosophy of happiness and suicide

Or: Do religious people have a good reason for viewing suicide as a sin?

Recently, a general question arose in one of the Facebook discussion groups regarding why the Bible does not actually prohibit suicide. The early commentators based such interpretations on the verse, “And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man's brother will I require the life of man” (Genesis 9:5). Observant Jews rely on the (historically much later) Beraita in the tractate of Semahot for the prohibition. In any case, the absence of a prohibition in the scriptures invites further inquiry. There are several figures in the Bible who could serve as candidates for such a discussion, such as Saul or Zimri—but the scriptures do not provide us with commentary or lessons regarding these specific stories of their deaths. A careful look at the sources tells a somewhat interesting different story.

This question reminded me of the wise yet obscure remark by C.S. Lewis in his successful book The Discarded Image (1964). Part of what Lewis tried to do in this book was trace the origins of the medieval worldview as he understood it. There, the Anglican Lewis raises the question of why the prohibition against suicide does not appear in the Old Testament or, more seriously, in the New Testament. Lewis concludes that the origin of this prohibition, with its typical justification that our lives are not our property but the property of God, actually comes from Plato in his famous dialogue Phaedo. However, there is a phrase that is often attributed to the Jewish sages, stating that “one who loses himself has no share in the world to come.” Although this phrase does not appear in the literature of the sages as we know it, a similar idea, again, in the context of divine ownership, appears in the writings of Josephus.

In any case, the question of suicide is rarely interesting in and of itself. It becomes interesting precisely because suicide serves as a paradigmatic case for questions of happiness and the purpose of life. There may be a strong side to the idea that we live in a culture where our understanding of happiness is particularly moralistic; correspondingly, in our context, the issue of suicide is regarded as a primordial sin. Happiness is perceived by us not only as an emotional state concerning our lives as a whole but also as an emotional state we are somewhat obliged to maintain. In a radical version, not only is happiness commanded, but joy is as well.

The process of naturalizing happiness carries a problem. “Naturalization” in this context means transferring full responsibility for a person's happiness to that person. However, the happiness that a person can “control” in this way is almost entirely limited to their mood, and accordingly, the prevalent understanding in our culture of happiness as a kind of imperative regarding the desired emotional regulation of the basic biological unit. There is no doubt that the capitalist culture that packages and sells happiness to the highest bidder also plays an important role in the reduction of the concept, but that may be a topic for another time.

In this context, I am reminded of the distinction made in the Aristotelian tradition regarding happiness. Anyone who has ever read Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics has encountered the peculiar duality between the concept of happiness and the concept of blessing. It seems that for Aristotle, the purpose of human activity oscillates between happiness and being blessed. Happiness, broadly speaking, is the aim towards which all human beings direct themselves, a purpose to which desires can be educated to aspire. Blessing, on the other hand, is that necessary completion of the fate of goods, without which—namely, the basic ones (food, water, political community)—a person cannot direct their desires at all, and without the higher ones (honor, economic prosperity, and descendants), one cannot be truly considered happy. In this way, Aristotle's concept of happiness contains a duality: on the one hand, it is not the Stoic or Epicurean concept, which is indifferent to the occurrences of fate, a concept according to which happiness is indeed always within a person's reach; and on the other hand, it is not the Cyrenaic concept, which is tied to the continuous pursuit of immediate desire satisfaction as fate presents it to us. It seems we would not be far off if we were to say that the concept of blessing contains those parts of happiness that are not dependent on a person, while the concept of happiness typically signals either the thing towards which the educated desires are directed or a certain activity of the person that can be identified with happiness.

An interesting consequence of this distinction by Aristotle is that “being happy” is not inherently good if we understand it in terms of the emotional state of joy or Stoic peace. In fact, we should have a good reason to be happy. This perspective, which suggests there may be a reason for our happiness and, correspondingly, of course, a reason why we are not happy, contradicts our intuition. According to this view, there are situations where we are justified in saying of ourselves, or of others, that they are not happy—sometimes in contradiction to the self-perception of the one claiming to be happy. Here, there is a double infringement against our intuition: (1) Happiness requires a reason, and (2) because happiness requires a reason, self-affirmation does not necessarily serve as the final authority in determining whether someone is happy.

According to MacIntyre, this double distinction between happiness and blessing is preserved in the translations and understanding of Aquinas in the Middle Ages. Thus, the eudaimonia (happiness) and beatitudo (blessing) became correspondingly felicitas and beatitude in Aquinas's thought. Happiness, for Aquinas, has the character of beatitude as a reward for a well-lived life, thus framing happiness as something that has a reason. However, what MacIntyre does not mention in this context is that Aquinas believes that perfect blessing is only possible after death and not before. With the risk of speculation, I would say there is a point for developing a concept of blessing, and therefore also of fate, that transcends this world and brings us back to Platonic notions that undoubtedly played at least some role in shaping the New Testament, and of course, in Aristotelian-Christian thought in the Middle Ages. Notions that, as we have seen, also found some footing in later Jewish tradition.

Finally, I think it is worth occasionally reminding ourselves of the obvious even in the Platonic tradition: even if we accept the categorical imperative of divine ownership over our lives, it is a minimum condition without significant implications for the concept of the good life. The more basic insight is to live lives that are worth living, that is, lives that have a reason to be called happy—whether the person feels joyful about their life or not. In this specific sense, it seems we need to reverse Kant's foundational thought. Instead of living our lives in a way that entitles us to be happy (Kant), we should live our lives in such a way that there is a good reason to call them happy.